Thursday, 13 November 2008

Twelve Vital X-Men Characters You Probably Don't Know

3: The Scarlet Witch

Who Is She?

Another one of Magneto’s kids. The Scarlet Witch, named for her scarlet outfit and the fact that… well, she’s a witch, is also called Wanda, which I’m told is a real name that people honestly have in real life. I remain sceptical. It’s a little bit of a stretch to put her in this list, in honesty, let alone this high up on the list, because she hasn’t logged that much time as an X-Man. Most of her time has been spent within The Avengers, instead, which is the Marvel comic that teams up most of their big names together to handle the biggest battles – Captain America, Iron Man, and so on. The Scarlet Witch has the mutant ability to control probability, which makes her potentially one of the most powerful mutant there is (sidenote: if you read comics often enough, you’ll come to realise that every single one of the X-Men could potentially be the most powerful mutant in existence). By controlling probabilities, I think she’s able to change reality in order to get her team the victory, making her a powerful deus ex machina device. She looks like this:

If it sounds like I don’t really know much about her, then this is because she recently had her powers revamped and redefined by a guy called Brian Michael Bendis, who sent her insane and added something called ‘chaos powers’ to the way her mutation works. It’s confusing, and I don’t understand it.

She was married, anyway, a while ago, to a robot. Yeah, I know, I know. Comics, eh? He was called The Vision, and they had some kids. Which, again, is bizarre – but this time there was some sense, because it turned out that Wanda had manipulated reality to create them. She eventually agreed to give them up, and had her mind wiped of their existence. A few years later, when Bendis took over writing The Avengers, he got another character to remind Wanda about her kids, and she went mental and started killing everyone. Thus, an event called ‘House Of M’ began.

Why Is She Important?

And that’s why she’s so important. In this event Wanda changed all of reality to her fantasy world where everyone got to live a happy life. Obviously she had to be stopped, and Wolverine (as ever) led the charge to fix the world and stop Wanda, which ended up with Wanda ranting and crying, and at the very end she called out:

Now you see why she’s so important. Those three words depowered almost all the mutants in the Marvel Universe, including some reasonably big names like Magneto and Professor X. Only two hundred were left, and the remaining mutants soon found that humans like to kick someone when they’re down. There is no way to reverse what Wanda did during the House of M, which means that eventually mutants will die out altogether. This has become the most important story thread in the X-Books, which is now at the heart of everything the X-Men try to do. One thing is for sure, however: if they ever find the gone-into-hiding Scarlet Witch, they’ll want to have some strong words with her.